Thursday, June 27, 2013

I Deduce Ether Trashes Height

Write down these five words: "aide," "heart," "tough," "gelatin" and
"emanate." There is something very unusual they have in common. What is
it? And what's another word with this property?

The answer is that each word can be rearranged into another word simply by moving the first letter to the end. AIDE becomes IDEA, etc.

The second part of the puzzle--coming up with a new word that shares this property--is super easy if you don't specify a minimum length. "Easy" could have been "Yeas" (as in, "The yeas have it."). Ross and I tried to find longer words. RANCHO / ANCHOR, GRIFFIN / RIFFING, etc. We got a bit cheeky when Ross suggested DUNSTABLE / UNSTABLED.

As you might have guessed, our photos on Sunday were of places with RANCHO, GRIFFIN, AND DUNSTABLE in their Flickr descriptions. (I threw in a DHURRIE rug, but I'll admit that I got that from the list.)

Our tie-break rule: In the event
that a single round number is announced with a qualifier such as
"about" or "around" (e.g., "We received around 1,200 entries."), AND two
separate people picked the ranges of numbers just before and just after
that round number, the prize will be
awarded to whichever
entrant had not already won
a prize, or in the event that
both entrants had won a
prize already or neither had,
then to the earlier of the
two entries on the
famous judicial principle of
"First Come First Serve,"
(or in technical legal jargon,
"You Snooze, You Lose"). As of July 2012, this rule is officially no longer obsolete (and also I still just like having fine print).

Another property these words have in common is that they are made up of discrete (Scrabble® approved) shorter words: ai, de, he, art, to, ugh, etc.Maybe not what Dr. S had in mind, but hard to discount.One of the anti-robotic code words I got is "Mehitable." I had only heard of "mehitabel," uncapitalized, of course.